Mediation an essential element in improving justice system

Marie Legault, Canadian High Commissioner to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean, believes that mediation can have a positive impact to achieve better access to justice and reduce delays in the system.

In the opening session on Monday at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre of the Mediation Refresher course facilitated by the Improved Access to Justice in the Caribbean (IMPACT Justice) project in association with the Supreme Court of Barbados, she highlighted: “Canada has supported the Justice sector in the region for many years, up to about 40 years from infrastructure to institutional support and we are happy to continue doing this.”

IMPACT Justice is a five-year regional justice sector reform project funded by the Government of Canada. It is being implemented from within the Caribbean Law Institute Centre, Faculty of Law, the University of the West Indies (UWI), Cave Hill Campus. IMPACT Justice is designed to address deficiencies in the justice sector in CARICOM, outside of those that are directly related to the judiciary and the courts.

Chief Justice, Sir Marston Gibson, K.A. indicated: “This training is important because what follows is practical. Each trainee will have three real cases from the High Court and three real cases from Magistrate’s Court. Usually in mediation training and arbitration training, a lot of the practical experience is done through role play, but you should have some practical exposure.

“What will happen after the training? They would be practical supervised by mediation trainers, who then will be in a position to review and guide the trainees.

“This collaboration with the court and IMPACT Justice project did not just start, but we would not have made it this far without the IMPACT project… There are some exciting prospects in the future,” he noted.